groupthink
and large, less likely than men to be drawn to the particular nature of computer coding and electronic systems work. On the other hand, he suggested, such studies had shown that many women are more naturally ‘empathetic’ than men, preferring to work co-operatively with other people rather than aggressively competing with them. They also tend to be more creative, and more at home with ‘jobs in artistic or social areas’ than with the intricacies of software coding. Damore was anxious to stress that he was not suggesting that all men or all women were like one thing or the other. He emphasized that there was ‘significant overlap’ between them. He was only talking about what the evidence showed to be the more likely weighting of motivation and aptitude on both sides, by way of trying to explain why Google was in these respects failing to meet its ‘diversity targets’. But his sacking and the consequent publication of his email provoked uproar. Some, both inside the company and in the wider world, applauded and sympathized with what he had written. But for many others, his suggestion that men and women might in any way be psychologically different was so outrageous as to be definitely a sackable offence. This was very much the line taken by Google’s Indian-born chief executive Sundar Pichai, who explained in a statement that Damore had to be dismissed because he had breached the company’s ‘basic values’, by ‘advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace’. ‘To suggest that a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work’, he wrote, ‘is offensive’. What all these stories have in common is the picture they paint of how society had become divided between two groups of people who seemed to have wholly different and incompatible views of the world. The members of one group shared a highly moralistic mindset in respect of what was permissible for people to say, think or do. They seemed only too eager to spot anyone or anything that could be seen as having given or likely to give offence. And they invariably 16